Former ABC News producer James Gordon Meek was sentenced to six years in prison on Friday for the transportation and possession of child sexual abuse material.
The sentence comes months after Meek, a one-time star national security reporter, pleaded guilty to two of the three counts he was charged with in a federal child pornography investigation. Earlier this week, as The Daily Beast reported, Meek asked for leniency in his case, partly blaming his war and torture reporting on his child pornography habit.
He had asked for a five-year sentence while prosecutors had asked for the maximum term of almost 16 years, arguing that Meek consumed and hoarded multiple devices’ worth of vile material.
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According to court documents, in February 2020, Meek used a messaging app on his iPhone to receive images and videos of children engaged in sexual activity, as well as to discuss his interest in child sex.
“Some of the images and videos depicted prepubescent minors and minors under the age of 12, including an infant being raped,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia wrote in a press release on Friday. “Meek brought the iPhone containing the child sexual abuse material back with him when he returned to Virginia. Additionally, Meek possessed multiple electronic devices containing images and videos of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”
Meek was arrested in February on a federal count of transporting child pornography and was later indicted on additional charges of possession and distribution of child porn. The distribution count was dropped as part of his plea agreement in July, though the two charges he pleaded guilty to carried a 20-year prison sentence.
Friday’s six-year prison sentence for Meek concludes a surreal saga that came into the national limelight last fall when Rolling Stone first reported that the award-winning producer’s home was raided by the FBI in April 2022.
While Meek abruptly quit his prominent ABC role the same day of the raid, Rolling Stone’s story raised concerns that the feds were targeting Meek over his national security work as a journalist. However, as Confider reported the following week, the raid had nothing to do with Meek’s reporting and he didn’t contact ABC’s lawyers, suggesting it was related to other matters.
Months later, it became apparent that Meek wasn’t under scrutiny over his intelligence reporting, but rather for child sexual abuse.
